On Nihilistic Destruction

So we covered a lot of dense ground surveying the material implications of the Iran war, but we still don't have a complete picture of the underlying motivations of the combatants in the conflict. This aspect of the conflict is important, as it tells us what is actually impelling the advancing material conditions of the crisis, and can provide clues as to where it may go. 

Unfortunately motivations are notoriously difficult to suss out. Getting into the heads of individuals requires those individuals volunteering their motivations, if they even understand their own motivations clearly. With powerful people, that is even more difficult for obvious reasons. And then you have to make sense of institutional and then whole state motivations as all of those layered individual motivations interact and add up, which Aurelien has been writing about.

Unless you're personally in the middle of these power centers and experiencing things personally, you are getting all of your information from various media, some of which is high quality and the rest of which is garbage. So this tends to dilute - or at least complicate - the predictive power of gauging motivations. 

What we can do here is come up with a composite based on the ongoing progression of events, hungrily clutching the good data like Gollum's Precious, taking into account historical trajectories and structural tendencies, simplifying the movements of these large organizational forms into personalities with certain characters, whose behaviors can be guessed at and speculated upon. 

That means veering back into the esoteric, and getting into an ontology of the respective motivating impulses of the main combatants in the war. 

In our initial discussion we talked about Iran's point of view and their motivations in the initial phase of the war: they've been cornered and are in an existential struggle to carve out a more acceptable state of geopolitical security for themselves, which necessitates a utilization of what leverage they have. This is straightforward: they've been repeatedly attacked, their state threatened on an existential level, and their leadership has been fairly clear and consistent in their communication of their intentions. 

But we didn't get too much into motivations of the actual aggressors who started the war, that is, the US and Israel, which I think are a little more difficult to get a handle on, because their motivations appear to be so confused, contradictory, and poorly realized when one pulls together the bulk of their media statements, as well as past and present actions and behaviors.  

On their face, these motivations seem fairly straightforward too: Israel has long considered Iran as a major threat to its power in the region, and not long after the previous 12 day war, they thought they saw weakness and a vanishing opportunity, and made the decision to strike again. 

The United States has a set of aims that are largely in alignment, along with some historical grievances to nurse, and made the decision to back Israel and preemptively strike with them. But then if you start to pick apart these motivations and the wavering actions on the ground, things start to fall apart.   

In terms of the US, we've been subjected to a never-ending carousel of changing motivations communicated in the press: we were engaging in a pre-emptive strike to back up Israel; no, wait, we were destroying Iran's nuclear capabilities and ballistic missiles that were supposedly annihilated in the previous 12 day war; no, wait, we were conducting regime change. Nevermind that there were no serious or coherent plans for any of that. 

And you look at Iran's overly cautious behavior in the years leading up to this war, and their willingness to compromise in negotiations that were then willfully scuttled and abused by the US. You look at the telegraphed fireworks shows in the form of airstrikes, and then the requests for cease fire in the backend, both in the 12 day war and the current war, and you get this strange sense that the US both cares and doesn't care about whatever result may come about. 

The rogue attack dog off-leash air that Israel gives off makes a little more sense, but not by much. It was them tapping out before the end of the 12 day war after all, as their interceptor defenses were wearing thin and more Iranian missiles and drones were getting through and doing more damage. Have they not been paying attention to the whole US "emptying its cupboards" thing to supply powers like them with munitions to carry on their genocide, in addition to supplying proxy powers like Ukraine?

It is here that I want to get into a more esoteric ontological discussion of these motivations, assisted by some great recent higher-level discussions on the Trillbilly Worker's Party podcast. 

What the guys at TWP explore in conversation is the basic structure and nature of the twin motivations of the attacking force in the Iran war. To engage once again in canine metaphor, we do seem to have the "tail wagging the dog" issue in which we have Israel's immediate interests driving the conflict. But to take the tail wag metaphor one step further, it is still the dog itself that is supplying that blood and tissue, which makes the wagging possible. 

Israel has long been a Western colonial project, in which the West (aided by Eastern Europe) exported one of its particularly thorny religious and cultural hang-ups, which went necrotic in the course of the World Wars and needed to be excised. The West and its Eastern European allies accomplished this by injecting its persecuted Jewish radicals into a territory opened up by the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, and then the West proceeded to lean on that territory ever more heavily as a foothold in the Middle East, after Iran turned against them, and it is this project now being rejected as Israel attempts to clear the territory for its own apartheid state. 

For Israel, the genocide, and their systematic and aggressive posture of sowing chaos and destruction in the region has turned them into a pariah, and now there is no way out but through, which it has attempted to accomplish by tugging at the skirts of a mythologized United States. But for their patron the US, this vision of religious zealotry and apocalyptic destruction seems to be the last compelling geopolitical vision to get behind, as there is nothing left to offer the world but to rain destruction and sow chaos. 

And it is the US' constant flows of aid and munitions which keep Israel running and fighting. At the same time, historical colonial investments have bequeathed Israel with a flourishing tech and surveillance sector, allowing it to export surveillance products trained on the subjugation of the Palestinian people, providing a valuable service and know-how to Western powers struggling with the same basic problem: how to manage populations that you can no longer offer anything to. This is a problem growing around the world too.      

It is easy enough to pick on the Trump administration, which takes this logic to an exaggerated end, but the US has had decades of developments towards this end. After decades of neoliberal policy and disintegration, concentration of wealth, and the systematic destruction of genuine alternatives, the US no longer knows what it is or what it stands for, and as such, is clueless as to what it can actually offer. Bored and struck dumb after decades of hegemonic power, where else is there to go or what else is there to do? 

There has been a lot of talk of nihilism when speaking about the motivations and actions on the part of the powerful in the United States. But what kind of nihilism are we talking about exactly? We often operate off of this mixed conception of nihilism where one believes in nothing, but then there is also often an element of destruction that is present at the same time. What is going on here?

After all, if you genuinely believed in nothing, it could be a conceivable outcome that you simply collapse on the floor and refuse to move, perishing right there. Because what really matters? No, where is this consistent element of destruction coming from?

Thinking about the psychology of power, you have this basic problem: you've come into your power through control of the helm. To let go of the helm is to let go of the basis of your power, and with the concentration of power, and the intoxicating and stupefying effects of great and sustained power, even the clear demonstration of incompetence and mismanagement is not enough to break that grasp, so the only way out is through knocking down any possible challenger or rival, sowing chaos, and spreading destruction.

This nihilistic destruction then appears as the natural terminus of that imperialist bid at the unceasing discharge of absolute power. Without a vessel to contain and regulate it, all of that undisciplined power flows outward, and disperses.  

We hear that Iran is in existential struggle, and that does appear to be true. But I think there could very well be an existential struggle in the West that mirrors it. Only, the locus of that Western existential struggle is concentrated in the individual, or at least in smaller groups, as opposed to some larger organized body struggling to survive, which could conceivably accelerate dissolution as greater and greater pressure is put upon individuals or small groups at odds with one another, after coming into contact with a larger organized body in existential struggle. In our case in the West, individuals may survive indeed, but whatever it was that we were a part of seems to be going away sooner rather than later. 

It ain't over yet; there is still a ways to go and much that can happen. But squinting at this basic ontology, we may have clues as to how things might advance. 

Spatial and Temporal Dimensions of the Strait of Hormuz Closure

Now I want to hook up the previous discussion of the spatial and temporal aspects of our political economy to these analyses by Yves Smith and Craig Tindale, which are absolutely harrowing. You really have to read them yourself to appreciate the gravity of what we are looking at. To summarize, they are a description of the systemic risks posed by a protracted closure of the Strait of Hormuz in the course of the Iran war. 

To seat further discussion, I'll briefly recap a higher-level takeaway from the previous discussion to provide a background framework: our global political economy has been predicated on the steady annihilation of time and space constraints. With perpetual revolution in powers of transportation, communication, production, etc. there is a necessity for a widening utilization of specialized materials and resources, which today translates to an uninterrupted circulation of advanced fuels, chemicals, materials, and manufactured products, which assist in the uninterrupted circulation of basic goods like food, water, and energy. 

As dazzling as it is, this rapid, uninterrupted circulation obscures the existence of geographically-bounded processes clustered in distinct territories. Over longer periods of time, these territories have been spatially reorganized into their current configurations, which aren't easily replaced or moved, and take long time frames and lots of energy and investment to do so. It is from these fixed territories that all of our marvelous modern resources, materials, and products come, which keeps global circulation of products and peoples rapid and stable. Through crisis we discover the nature of these productive territories, and their disruption can cause all of this rapid motion to come to a screeching halt. 

Lets turn to an aspect of Craig Tindale's central analysis to illustrate this: the cascading systemic effects of a bulk loss in circulation of even a single global resource, that of sour crude oil, due to the Strait of Hormuz closure. The implications of this single resource bottleneck are highly interconnected and dependent, but I am just going to get into one section of that analysis with some added commentary to flesh out the greater point I am trying to make, leaving the rest to your imagination.

For one thing, due to regional geological histories, different types of crude oil are found in different parts of the world. A given oil field took millions of years with an incomprehensible array of natural forces working to produce it, so whatever is there is what you get, and then that is effectively it. Some 20% of the world's crude oil currently passed through the Strait of Hormuz, a majority of it sour crude, named for its acidity and its sulfur content. This oil is extracted where it is found all over the Middle East, where it is loaded up on ships in the Persian Gulf and then shipped out through the Strait of Hormuz to the rest of the world. 

Logistically this is how you get huge quantities out of this region fast at lower cost, and this is how everything was regularly working up to this point. You can transport some of this by pipeline and truck, or on existing rail, but you can't transport as much as fast or as far, and increasing any of these parameters require new intensive investments in the infrastructure to support that. Plus sour crude is more corrosive and toxic, so you need specialized equipment and infrastructure to move it safely. 

There is redundancy: there are other places where sour crude is extracted, such as Venezuela, Mexico, and Canada, but again it requires time and investment to compensate for the huge loss in the Middle East, if there is even enough remaining exploitable reserve to compensate with, and then there is the matter of the difficulty of extracting the heavy crude deposits remaining from places like Canada and Venezuela, which require additional extractive technologies to process the more difficult reserves. 

So this mad war has resulted in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has taken a huge bite out of the sour crude supply. Which poses a longer term problem too: as Ian Welsh and others have noted, the idled shipping in the Persian gulf has led to upstream issues, such as the backing up of oil flows for Middle Eastern producers, with maxed out oil storage leading to the necessity of shutting down production at the wells, and when you shut down production on a well, it can be more difficult to get it going again, and this difficulty grows the more time passes.  So you have the first order problem of less oil to go around, which is used for just about everything in a modern industrial economy, which not only drives up energy and fuel prices but really the price of everything. But then there is a second order problem that follows from this too. 

As Tindale notes, regulations require that the sulfur content of sour crude be removed for it to be used in fuels and other products, and as a biproduct of that refining process, the removed sulfur makes for an indirect contribution to the majority of the world's sulfur production. With the strait closed, between the stoppage of the sour crude and LNG processing, you get an 8% loss in global sulfur production, by Tindale's estimation. 

You need sulfur to produce sulfuric acid, which is a crucial component of the modern industrial economy, with applications in metals extraction, artificial fertilizers, and wastewater treatment, to casually name a few crucial functions. Notice also that sulfuric acid is also highly toxic and corrosive, requiring advanced handling infrastructure, so alternatives here are not easily invested in quickly, and so a shortage is not easily or quickly remedied. 

With shortage, a strain is put on the global sulfuric acid industry, leading to a downstream strain on the mining and metals industries. Here Tindale gives a good example of the potential strain on production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and in Zambia, where you get to see another territorialized cluster of global industry. Resources like copper, cobalt, and nickel must be extracted on an industrial scale where they are geologically abundant, and places like the DRC and Zambia are where you find them. 

Metals like copper, cobalt, and nickel are heavy, especially embedded in ore, so they aren't traveling very far before being processed for export. Indeed, the sulfur-burning acid plants are in the DRC and Zambia, close to the mining operations,  The sulfuric acid is either exported or used in the region in acid-leaching processes to separate the metals from the ores, so that the metals can exported in turn. 

Since the DRC and Zambia are not necessarily rich in sulfur, much of the sulfur must be imported, which is where we get the aforementioned strain on sulfuric acid production. Less sulfuric acid means a direct strain on the metals extraction process that requires it for separating metal from ore, so less copper, cobalt, and nickel are going out too. 

With the income these large operations are bringing in, these already-strained regions could become more unstable, radiating that political instability outward. We could go on describing even more downstream effects: new electrical products and electricity generation being starved of metals, chipmaking starved of energy and sulfuric acid, data centers starved of chips and electricity, and etc. 

These are just a few steps into one possible broken resource chain, and there are many more resources implicated in a much more complex web. Do read the analyses linked above and think them through. And we haven't even gotten into the political and financial layers connected to these resource chains. Its all tangled up. 

Gee, we've come so far. Once we fought over guano islands, timberlands, silver mines, salt mines, spice trades, and what have you. Now we fight over these global supply chains of some of the strangest and most dangerous substances you can imagine, which are intricately weaved together, tightly coupled and circulating together all over the world, powering and lubricating this deadly whirling Rube Goldberg machine that has been spiriting much of our food and other resources to us from various corners of the globe, which seems to drive people insane even when its growth merely slows.  

Many of the key nodes in these supply chains, where the actual territorialized production processes hum away to produce these substances, clustered in strikable nodules, cannot be easily moved or reconfigured without years of concerted effort and investment. Neither can these operations be starved for too long to remain economically viable, as their host nations are often deep in debt, requiring a constant flow of exports bringing in income.  

Like the various natural ecological services we rely on - that are too complex and too long term to reproduce - these productive operations are themselves abused and driven into the ground, simultaneously in many parts of the world, as labor is squeezed and wealth polarizes and political instability grows, concurrently as increasingly intense climate and ecological events mount through the abuse of the natural world. 

There are many of these productive territories, which only seem to reveal themselves to the ruling class through crisis, which becomes ever more likely as one after the other, neglected and abused, goes into crisis, weakening the others downstream, prompting additional crises. 

Spatial and Temporal Considerations of the Achaemenids and Greeks

I don't have the full story yet of what types of resource flows were involved in the back-and-forth struggle of the Achaemenid empire and the Greeks, but one issue that does seem to come up repeatedly is the presence of resources like timber and pitch in regions like Macedonia and other parts of the Balkans, which figured prominently in ship building in the ancient world. 

It would make sense that regions such as these would become contentious in terms of who is controlling them and the resources that are coming out of them. You need a hell of a lot of timber for those larger ships, and if you are looking to be a major player in maritime trade and warfare - which has been a necessity for the rapid movement of large quantities of resources for thousands of years - you better have a healthy supply. And those really large, healthy groves only grow in certain places.

The Space and Time of Industrial Political Economy

I'm going to briefly run through a summary of one aspect of the geographer David Harvey's work - who works off of Marx in turn - which will make for a useful framework to structure a companion piece on the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. 

In any sort of political economy - but especially in industrial political economy as we'll see - time and space are important dimensions to consider in the function and operation of the world economic system. Through the history of the capitalist system, it has been the relentless annihilation of time and space that has been among the most important (and predictive) motivating factors in support of capital's historic drive to accumulate and grow. 

However short-termist capital's appetites for extraction and profit may be, there are periods of its development when it is willing to engage in energy and resource-intensive long-term infrastructural and technological investments and conquest to effect the toppling of spatial and temporal barriers to accumulation. 

So we see historical improvements in transportation and communication for example that are linked to decades of research and development, and then years or even decades more embodying these improvements in massive and durable infrastructure projects, such as in the form of rail, ports, energy and electrical infrastructure, lines of communication, and then the ongoing development of various iterations of Internet technologies, and so on, so as to speed up the movement of materials and the coordination of production. There are complex historical reasons for this that I've explored elsewhere and don't have time for now, but a smattering of them include capitalist competition, warfare, various environmental and political pressures, and so on.   

The dimensions of time and space are inextricably linked together, and function together. The rapid movement of materials to and fro implies places that those materials are rapidly moved from and rapidly moved to, which adds an entirely new dimension of consideration to the historical processes of acceleration and movement. 

Historical to capitalist development, you not only see a continuous development of means and technologies to reduce the significance of distance in the passage of time, but also the complete spatial overhaul of relationships in the spaces between those distances. This began as a revolutionary overhaul of the means of production, which included gathering labor forces more tightly and densely together, and breaking their tasks down into increasingly simplified and specialized tasks which worked together in an organized and mechanistic manner, speeding up the actual processes of production locally.

This process was multidimensional in its effects. One good example Harvey gives is in the early phases of the Industrial Revolution when there was a transition from wood-burning to coal-burning for energy applications. There was a temporal element in this transition, as the energy dense and portable coal packed a bigger punch in a smaller package for the generalized acceleration of transportation and production. 

But there was also an additional spatial dimension as well: you get wood from trees, and you need a lot of it for a reliable energy source, and this takes a lot of land space, which competes for livestock, agriculture, production, and habitation spaces. With coal, you can go underground, and with parallel advances in the steam engine, it became possible to pump out a mine, allowing mining to go even deeper, freeing up the horizontal realm for ever more production. 

As this process gathered steam, the capitalist system went on to reconquer and reconfigure those distant lands where certain complexes of desired resources were to be found, which were either unique to their geography, or which posed as additional reserves when the local resources were burned up. These additional production centers had to be re-organized and invested in, which took time, but which then vastly accelerated production as they came online. This process was carried out by generations of hegemonic imperial powers and by their allies and rivals looking to modernize and rationalize their own societies to better compete. 

The more technological progress you make, the faster you are crossing larger distances, the more you are speeding up production, and the better you are besting rivals, the more pronounced is a tendency to require more and more quantities of different types of materials of greater specificity, which are sourced all over the world for either their uniqueness or for their redundancy and abundance, while at the same time denying rivals those very materials so that they can't compete.  

It is this historical process that defines the structural bounds of the present crisis. The world system, as it has been set up, now needs to run at a continuously rapid pace, as the perpetual circulation of the lowest fundamental necessities such as food, water, energy, and etc. is more dependent than ever on the perpetual smooth function of higher technological tiers of operation in transport, communication, security, energy, and so on, as such a system tends to destroy the slower, more localized processes of production that exist as impediments to the acceleration of its processes of production and accumulation.   

One example I really like is the pouring of vast amounts of concrete. Concrete is a really important resource for modern infrastructure, and a highly flexible and workable material. Anything really big with a heavy footprint at the very least needs a deep foundation which requires a lot of concrete. Any sort of heavy industry or transport requires strong, stable, lasting surfaces realized with a material like concrete or some similar material form like asphalt. 

In general, it is an indispensable base material for building upon or building with; it is what you want if you want a flat plane that will stay put with a stability and a predictability and to get you up out of the dirt, and which can be thrust upon, or hold things in place to build further upon. It is inseparable from civilization at this point. There is a reason concrete is the second-used substance in the world next to water. 

But as you lay down concrete to travel on or build upon, you must lay it upon the earth, covering up the earth and anything within or underneath. As the concrete radiates ever further outward as the built environment expands, you must traverse across its growing distances at ever more rapid rates, and the provision of natural resources has to occur ever further outside its bounds, with resources trucked in and finished products and wastes trucked out. This tendency could be managed differently under another political economy, but a more expansionary laissez faire version is what we have. 

Besides pouring more concrete for development, existing concrete must be maintained as it passes through its lifecycle by getting busted out, with new concrete poured in. You also have to bust concrete out any time you make changes to anything underneath, such as conducting maintenance on plumbing and sewage systems, and then you re-pour over the finished job. So concrete is getting poured all the time, which means you have to constantly be making it. You can recycle old concrete as aggregate, but that aggregate becomes less firm and stable with each generation of its use.

Concrete is composed of cement - typically made up of cooked limestone and clay and other materials - and various aggregates to bulk up the volume and add stability, such as coarse gravel and sand, the latter of which adds additional stability and fills in smaller voids. Here's where things get even more interesting. The type of sand you need for strong, stable concrete tends to be sand in which the individual grains are water-sculpted, making them more varied and angular, which you are more likely to find on river banks, lakes, and coastal zones. 

Sand that is acted on by the wind on the other hand tends to be more rounded and uniform, which is less effective as an aggregate in concrete. Research is ongoing to process less suitable sands for concrete, but that means adding expensive intermediate processes, as opposed to simply scooping it up. The interest in this alternative implies a shortage. And sand mining competes with coastline ecologies, water sources, landscape stability, and other natural resources.  

So you can only find good concrete sand in certain places, and sand is quite heavy, so you have to figure in the economics of its extraction and then its transport. You'll often find concrete plants at good central places near where the gravels are quarried and the sands are gathered, and then that mixed concrete is transported somewhere else in turn. In larger construction projects, you may even find a central mix plant close by, which mixes the concrete with water to get it ready for direct pouring, a time sensitive service. 

The spatial and temporal dimensions of the process of competitive production, toward the end of competitive accumulation, places hard limits on the actual physical places of production. Concrete manufacturing complexes must be developed in consideration of the economics of mining sensitive resources where they occur, and then getting large amounts of those resources, which are very heavy, where they need to go, where they are subsequently mixed and then enter into distribution as a product. These productive processes occur in a territory then, a delimited space which must be organized in accordance with the production of value and surplus value. 

In the West, it is easy to lose sight of this aspect of territorialization, what with the hitherto rapid and smooth movement of goods and services, though in recent years in the course of the pandemic and given the current crisis in the Middle East, the inner workings of these vast supply chains have become much more visible as they have begun to break down. In the companion piece to this one, we'll marshal this framework to explore the contemporary dimensions of this historical process, as well as the crisis that emerges within the confines of its structure. 

History is Hard

At a certain scale, the study of history can be a very difficult thing to navigate. With the intensity of our collective instruments of research, and our access to the vast amounts of information and inquiry now possible, we have a very long timeframe to account for now, which is suffused with an incredible richness of knowledge wherever you look. And with each new day, we make more history. 

If you choose any given historical period, you find that as you go deeper into that period, there is more and more to know, and more going on than you previously imagined, and that it was all simplification upon simplification in the history books, and even in our best efforts, and our cutting edge research. 

You can see how a given scholar can dedicate their entire life to a certain smaller period of time, or even region or limited subject. Poring through the historical record, you see name after name, relation after relation, event after event, and almost immediately in any given procession of events, the mind begins to melt. It takes a gifted person to organize all of that into a compelling narrative that works, so it becomes very important to learn from gifted individual thinkers covering a variety of topics throughout history to even begin to make sense of it all. 

Clash of Titans

Taken together, Paul Cooper's Fall of Civilizations podcast episode on the Achaemenid Empire and Dan Carlin's Hardcore History series on Alexander the Great (still ongoing) paint a gorgeous, multi-faceted historical picture on a very large spatial and temporal scale.  

With Achaemenid Persia, you could see the empire steadily coalescing under the capable hand of Cyrus the Great, famously besting the prophecy-misreading king Croesus among others, and defeating and annexing Medea and Babylon, in addition to Croesus' Lydia. The famous Achaemenid multi-cultural polity and policy, and religious tolerance began as genuine aspects of Cyrus' rule, but which would later be used as weapons, which we'll get to. 

Besides their flexible and tolerant approach to empire-building, the Achaemenids advanced a number of impressive feats in centralized bureaucracy and governance, development of a civil service and a professional army, development of cutting edge infrastructure such as roads in the form of the Royal Road - parts of which are still in use today - and an organized postal system which were adopted by later empires. Culturally the Achaemenids were emulated by other cultures in many ways, including in fashion, with the eventual widespread adoption of pants for example.

As Achaemenid Persia conquered its surroundings, it would annex those territories while attempting to keep their local cultures and religions intact, allowing them to largely carry on their own governance, installing satraps to rule them as satrapies (territories under Persian control), who were amenable to the local population but who could also be counted on for loyalty, maintaining resource flows, and helping to provision the Persian military, among other functions.

As the empire expanded out to its full extent you could make out a growing dispersal of its power and vitality over a longer period of time, which happened both in its core through indications of a degradation of leadership and occasional usurpations and brushfire civil war - with an occasional talented ruler emerging - and out in its periphery though a degradation in the satraps themselves, as they ruled over crumbling satrapies, responding to pressures and shocks of their own.

Because after all the peripheral territories had histories of their own and local forces and interests to harness and manage to conduct their own governance, with local individuals competing for power and resources, which had to somehow be harmonized with the distant Persian interests. Starting in 499 BC, one particularly large series of shocks, known as the Greco-Persian war as a whole, demonstrates this process well. And the roots of this conflict go back to the empire's early expansion. 

From a certain vantage point, that legendary Delphi Oracle prophecy that said Croesus would destroy a great empire if he went to war with Cyrus takes on a Moebius strip quality through the passage of time. To foreshadow a bit, the prophecy would end implicating the Achaemenid empire after all. 

After gleefully misinterpreting the prophecy and charging into war, Croesus' empire would fall to Cyrus' army, clearing the way for the Persians' annexation of Lydia. But Lydia contained on its coast the Ionian Greeks who settled there after the Bronze Age collapse of Mycenean Greece, and these Greeks would be incorporated into the Achaemenid empire. 

Over time, the Persians found the Greeks to be a troublesome bunch. The Greeks didn't have easily identifiable and stable native ruling elites to co-opt and rule through, only aristocracies made up of feuding factions that were difficult to get a handle on. So they ruled through local tyrants that they sponsored, who had the difficult task of maintaining power locally while remaining loyal to the Persians who supported them. 

It was in 499 BC when this troublesome arrangement hit a snag. To cut a long story short, one of the local Greek tyrants, a gentleman by the name of Aristagoras, would find his political position in danger after a failed venture to shore up his standing at home and curry favor with the Persians. His joint venture with the satrap Artaphernes to carry out a siege on the island of Naxos ended in failure after a tangled mess of leadership conflicts and a protracted siege exhausted the expedition's resources. 

Rather than risk political ruin or worse, Aristagoras incited the Ionian Greeks to revolt against the Persians, and they did. The revolt widened - which indicated existing issues with the Greek and Persian relations - with Sparta refusing support, but with Athens and Eretria agreeing to support the rebellion. 

Despite the lively revolt, which went on for 6 years or so, the Greek offensive was not at full force and relatively fragmented, and the Persian response was decisive and apparently fair. The revolt was put down, and the lead perpetrators were hunted down and executed, and the rebelling provinces were brought back under Persian control. 

However, underlying motivations in the Persian leadership were shifting from governance to revenge. The Persian king Darius vowed to punish Athens and Eritrea for their support of the Ionian revolt. He was reported to be like a dog after a bone, asking a servant to remind him of the Athenians some three times a day. He was also convinced that the rest of the Greeks were a threat to the stability of the empire anyway, and that they would eventually need to be brought under control. 

As part of the first major invasion of Greece, in 492 BC the Persians re-subjugated Thrace and Macedonia after those regions became more independent after the Ionian revolt. However at 490 the Persians were defeated by Greece at the Battle of Marathon, and then Darius died before the invasion could continue. Darius' successor Xerxes was eager to carry on the invasion, with the empire working itself into a frenzy, but at this point, the invasion was uniting the whole Greek world, which would put up a more coordinated, spirited defense. 

Xerxes enjoyed several victories, including a pyrrhic one after being delayed at the famous Thermopylae, which was an inspiration to the Greek world, motivating them to fight back hard, and eventually beat back the Persians. The final defeat of the Persians at Mycale encouraged the Greek cities in Asia to revolt and the Macedonians to regain their independence. 

After the invasion ended in disaster, Xerxes was assassinated, and the Persians halted military operations in Greece. However after their victory, the Greeks would enter into their own period of dispersion, with Persia opting to hang back and take advantage of the growing disunity, seeking to wedge apart the various Greek powers, playing them against each other by picking favorites and funding them against their rivals, with that tactic figuring prominently in various conflicts, such as the highly destructive Peloponnesian war. 

Athens' power and fortunes would come and go, with Persia backing the Spartans and the mainland Greeks against them. And then Spartan triumphalism and imperialism after the war would alarm the Persians, leading them to back an alliance of Athens, Thebes, and Corinth against Sparta in the Corinthian War. Athens' fortunes began to shift again, with them reclaiming lost ground, in the war, and alarmed, the Persians would throw their weight back behind the Spartans. After enough of that, when the Greeks were sufficiently weakened, that war was concluded with The King's Peace, which left Persia back in control of Ionian Greece, and the remaining Greek states as atomized, autonomous entities which were not allowed to form alliances, opening the door to perpetual Persian meddling indefinitely. Sound familiar? 

In the face of the Greek defiance, Persian tolerance would turn into contempt and then open hostility, and they would weaponize their abilities to appeal to disparate cultures by instrumentalizing the aims of distant cultures such as the Athenians and Spartans, encouraging their disagreements and amplifying the momentum of the challenger of the moment, while throwing its weight against the victors who had gotten more powerful, so as to further disperse their energies. This long history of invasion and then the subsequent background meddling would instill a deep resent and hatred of the Persians in the Greek populations, which would have future consequences. 

All of that dispersing Greek energy would then coalesce again in the rising Macedonian empire, firming up under the capable hands of Philip II, revolutionizing the army in the process, with his gaze turned towards Persia. A fascinating story in itself, but the post grows long. 

To cut another long story short, eventually that consolidated empire, replete with a deadly and well-oiled war machine, freshly revolutionized, would be handed off to Alexander III, or Alexander the Great as we know him, after his father Philip II was assassinated. Alexander consolidated his legitimacy, quelling various revolts such as in Thebes so as to bring the rest of the Greeks under his umbrella. And this young ruler had a bottomless well of ambition and an unquenchable appetite for endless war. It was with these material capabilities and personal attributes that Alexander assumed his departed father's stance towards Persia, a hated enemy which presided over vast lands, resources, and treasure.  

With that, Alexander launched himself and his Macedonian army into Achaemenid Persia, sweeping through that aging and weakening empire like a wildfire through so much dried-out kindling, spreading Greek culture and ideas all the while, like mycelium taking root in the sooty aftermath of scorched earth. 

Alexander's conquest of the vast holdings of Persia were similar to the future Arab conquests, in that he arrived with a thunderclap, taking a staggering amount of territory in such a short amount of time, with his conquest lasting just as briefly. After exhausting his expansionary limits and then having his life cut short, Alexander's empire would fracture under civil war after his death, leaving behind Macedonia proper, Ptolemaic Egypt, the Attalid kingdom in West Asia Minor (now Turkey), and the Seleucid Empire in a large part of what is now known as the Middle East. 

Later on I might fill in more of the latter half of this story, especially as Dan Carlin finishes his series on Alexander the Great, but that's enough for now. There was a general takeaway that I was most interested in expressing here. You can see these complexes of organized human activity - these empires - expand over time, fighting to maintain their shape with initial goals of governance and broad-based prosperity, goals which break down after the ravages of time and successive shocks deteriorate these structures, with power concentrating at the top, leading to king-driven processes of conquest, revenge, and extraction.

And different structures with different histories evolve differently, as we saw with the parallel development of the Greeks and Persians, which then interact with each other and influence each others' trajectories. And further, these structures evolve temporally as they expand, and come into contact with each other, and decline and collapse, and then reconstitute into something else, or reconstitute somewhere else, changing over time, which is something we can get more into another time too. 

Fast forward to today, and we have this striking inversion, where the West as spearheaded by its US hegemon - what with its affinity for the ancient Greeks as its spiritual predecessors - struggles with a dissipation of its own as it shambles after Iran, which has dug into the mountainous region where the Achaemenid empire once stood, with the West seeking its revenge after various historical insults, its goodwill exhausted after 80 years of various smaller scale wars of aggression and perpetual meddling, seemingly unaware of the yawning chasm of hollowed-out capability, with a dim inkling of some kind of plan. A rabid dog after a phantom bone. 

Gutpunch

So the Iran war is going into its third day, and already so much has happened, accompanied with a flurry of commentary. I'm going to put some of the commentary I've heard together and further some secondary commentary with some more open-ended speculation, as I won't be able to keep up with facts on the ground. 

Before that, in consideration of how complex and fast-moving this state of affairs is, I'm going to do something a little risky and describe something largely ineffable. Us moderns are trained to be very wary of the ineffable and the slippery for good reason, but it might be worth talking about nevertheless. 

This war feels very big. What I mean by that is that I've detected a rising sense of anguish that is particularly acute in nearly everyone I've talked to about this. In somewhere like the United States that has remained untouched by total war for quite some time, you hear about various distant wars and can be completely sickened and outraged by them - and we've had plenty of that - but its not the same thing as being closer to the war itself and being in danger of directly suffering its effects, whatever form they may take. But this one feels closer in a way, on account of being so big. 

In the last two decades at the very least (going back a smidge to 911 and the War on Terror), there has been one shock after another in the US, with each shock getting bigger and more frequent, with public trust and legitimacy getting weaker and weaker as a result. This is also true throughout the West. And as you get weaker, those shocks are more likely to hit, and when they hit, they hit harder. It's like riding in a car while you're sick: each bump and jostle - however minor they may be on their own - just ripple right through you, turning your stomach and making your head throb. And the West is pretty sick. Or maybe dope sick. 

We know it, we've watched it. For those paying attention, we know how financialized and hollowed out and corrupt - economically, culturally, morally, and so on - the West has gotten, and at the same time, we've been watching as a country like Iran has been pushed to the brink and into the realm of existential struggle. 

You may know of that rising feeling of unease and then panic as you watch someone getting pushed and pushed and you can feel a fight coming on, just before it erupts. Well and things have erupted: we have a fight and we have strikes all over the Middle East. Things could very well cool down again in a couple of days and return to a simmering unease, but it sure doesn't feel like it. 

Before getting too absorbed in those feelings though, I mentioned putting together some commentary and speculating a bit, which could help corroborate some of this ineffable stuff.   

Iran has been essentially cornered. Its caution, its amenability to political compromise, and its desire for stability have all been turned against it repeatedly, and it has become quite clear that the US and Israel want to strangle it, no matter what it does. But Iran is a bigger and stronger target. So it has to fight, whatever that might look like now, and its leadership does seem to be communicating this to itself.      

A land invasion of Iran would be quite difficult, and is unlikely. They still face getting bombed for days on end, though from the sounds of it they have a healthier missile and drone stockpile than their foes, and possibly greater powers of production, figuring in potential support from Russia and China. They also face intelligence penetration and further assassinations, as well as some difficult diplomatic decisions to make when some of the kinetic pressure is lifted. Iran has already been dealing with these problems for quite some time though, and has had a lot of time and experience trying to account for them.   

Here is what I find most interesting: one of the more powerful levers that Iran can really put its weight on is its position in the Middle East - just look at a map - which with its size and reach, puts it within striking distance of countless targets vital to the global economy, and they know it. Commentators have been pointing this out for decades. 

And they're already hitting bases and airports, and other buildings where US and Israeli targets are suspected, and now they've hit some vital oil infrastructure. These strikes alone will strain economic activity throughout the region, which will ripple through the world economy as well. Iran has also effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, where 20% of world oil supplies flow through. 

In the West, we know how financialized and hollowed-out our portions of the world economy are; how threadbare and wound-tight they are; how thin the walls of the asset bubbles are; how flighty and craven and faithless our investors are. And we've had ongoing inflation for some time caused by numerous destructive forces in the greater economy, which intensifies these existing problems, and which would be greatly further strained by rising oil prices, climbing investment risks and interest rate hikes, strained insurance services, and the like.    

Iran is in a central position to strike very sensitive, crucial organs and chokepoints of the world economy, and then with the widespread interpenetration and high visibility of Internet activity, they get nearly instant feedback of their probes. 

Iran also hit targets of US and Israel allies, such as those of the Gulf states and the Europeans, who have made noises about entering the war. But the Gulf states are incredibly polarized extractive regimes that are largely unpopular. European allies like the UK, France, and Germany are not far behind them with serious political and economic problems of their own. Protests in places like Bahrain and Pakistan have already flared up, and propaganda-wise, these regimes are paying indirectly for the sins of the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. 

And the Iranians have been handed gold to make propaganda with: some of their statements have referred to their enemies as pedophiles, which is at least true for the ruling elite. The West has refused to clean house: it has allowed genocide to eat away at international law; it has allowed elite impunity to eat away at domestic law and public morality; it has allowed deep and widespread economic corruption, polarization, and deindustrialization. Try leaning on friends like that. And what is left to believe in or fight for?

And what of Russian and Chinese involvement? Besides economic, covert, and diplomatic support, it seems things have been relatively quiet, though that could change quickly. It is hard to imagine them letting Iran go without a struggle. 

But information is a little easier to pass along covertly than material support. Russia has struggled with the same diplomatic problems that Iran is now facing, and has resolved that it can no longer trust a word Western diplomats say, and proceeded with its own invasion of Ukraine, steadily grinding down its military capability and surgically dismantling its infrastructure. They've been doing this for years, learning all the while.  

Now that Iran is cornered, it is easy to imagine some hard conversations taking place about these lessons, considering Iran's diplomatic woes and its position to do on a larger scale to the world economy what has been done to Ukraine. 

But there is a lot in the air. Considering the tight coupling and interdependency of the world economy, these could be risky moves on the part of some of the BRICS members as well. It depends on how much successful work has been done to decouple, and whether this can be isolated from the damage done to the Western sphere. 

Further, Iran has political and economic woes of its own. The war could further intensify beyond anyone's imagination or endurance, or the West could yet again back off, and then we are back to this simmering critical state, waiting for another big blowout. 

This is the meaning of this war feeling very "big." Historical accounts of the decline of Roman Britain come to mind, where the Romans speak of this inflection point where the isolated "barbarian" incursions suddenly became much more coordinated and strong. And with a political economy in decline at home and an increasingly unmanageable resistance against the colony abroad, there came a point where it was time to turn tail and abandon that project entirely. 

Temptation of the Abstract

I know I'm on a bit of an "abstraction" and "concrete" kick here, but hear me out. This is something I've gotten into before, but I think it bears repeating again. For all of its powers of inclusion, flexibility, universality, illumination, and so on, the process of abstraction is adding something to something that already exists. It is simplifying and organizing something so that that something can be more readily understood and anticipated, and possibly manipulated. In responsible hands, this can be a useful and powerful tool. It is a tool that can also greatly assist deception and exploitation, and much worse. Its power is all the more terrible the more compelling and comprehensive its narrative, which allows for lies to be carefully buried deep underneath its dazzling infrastructure. 

Expertly placed, concrete truths whose relations are defined through abstraction can lend ever more credibility to a false structure. But those same concrete truths can be used to test the validity of their proposed relation. 

Phenomenology of the Abstract versus the Concrete

There are good reasons for mastering the interplay between the abstract and the concrete. For all of its flexibility and universality, the abstract takes a lot of mental work to render into full clarity. When someone is making abstract arguments, you may find that it takes a strain to follow the arguments, in which you work to keep various symbols in the proper relation to each other, adding more connections and elements, grasping for the meaning of such a structure which relates to the real. 

What lends such arguments more power is then anchoring them into the concrete, utilizing various vehicles of metaphor and analogy for their powers of transmissibility, converting concrete particulars into universals, grafting them onto the abstract structure.  

Metaphorical concrete-anchored concepts like "hard" and "soft," or "hot" and "cold" take their power from a visceral evocation of direct experiences, which are immediately apprehended by the body in sense and muscle memories. One comes up against something "hard" in one's experience, and one can immediately feel limitation and resistance on the fingers and against one's muscles. One "knows" what it means in one's "bones," as it is often put. 

The "concrete" conceptual category is apt, as it allows for a firming up of one's inquiry, establishing a conceptual certainty that one can "stand" on and thrust against without becoming lost in constant draining mental contrasts. 

But where the concrete concept loses steam is in its very particularity: hot can cool to cold, and heat to hot again, and soft things can become hard, or hard things soften, and one becomes lost in the perpetual dramas of transformation and movement. The abstract, through its connective relationality, situates those many gradations into "structure," which can more readily be apprehended and understood and organized in the mind's eye, and in turn, anticipated. 

What to Work On?

This poor old blog has been seeing some neglect, I know. But maintaining different projects and observing the changing courses of those projects does yield some interesting insights, some of which I had not anticipated.  

A lot of the writing energy has shifted to my Substack project for several reasons. Part of it is the public nature of it. When you have a number of people you know regularly anticipating some results, it does spur you to get it done. It jogs the superego, to put it another way. Kind of like doing something strenuous with another person: if both of you commit to something together, you really want to stick to it even more, because you're not only letting yourself down but also the other person if you don't follow through. 

Synergizing with that, as you get more done and what attention starts coming your way tends to seed those little spurts of inspiration, and then it starts to pull you in a certain direction. This was something Dolly Parton noticed and attributed to her sudden vigorous output of songwriting material, which happened earlier on when her career was taking off, as explored in the wonderful and moving Dolly Parton's America podcast. Not that my projects could be meaningfully compared to the scale and power of Dolly's career, but I did instantly recognize that basic impulse and motivation, and it made for a good example to point to anyway.  

Nevertheless, I do find that I have to spend some more willpower to keep working here, but I think it is energy well worth spending. Much of the creative and intellectual resources I have at my disposal on the Substack project were forged here, through years and years of experimentation and contemplation, thinking and writing in silence, getting thoughts down on the metaphorical "page," and then having them represented back at me here. It was not just ideas and concepts that developed either, but a process and a craft. 

That continuous development is still very important to me, and I have a whole lot of ground to still cover here, so I keep coming back to do the work. It is kind of like sharpening an axe, or any kind of blade really. The sharpening part is a pain in the ass: it is repetitive and kind of boring. The sound of it is grating and harsh on the ears and it feels gritty and unpleasant to the touch.

But then you have this beautiful, shiny sharp edge at the end of it. It is much more fun to chop wood than to sharpen, but chopping with a dull blade is garbage and dangerous even. The added joy and effectiveness of a sharpening job well done makes the subsequent chopping all the more satisfying and enjoyable, and it is safer besides. Those observed results can really give you the "oomph" you need to muster up the willpower and do the damn sharpening. 

Abstraction as Inclusion

I try to imply in my language and the way that I structure my arguments - and perhaps I've explicitly stated it here and there - that I may have stumbled upon some things here in my limited experience that could be of some use, but I don't intend for these things to be prescriptions for everyone. Nevertheless, I thought it might be a good thing to write up a more formal post on it.

I make use of a lot of these simpler material metaphors as building material that I've come across in the course of my life, which I have direct experience of and which have taught me certain things and revealed certain things to me. The purpose of the metaphors in this case is to abstract from those more concrete and grounded experiences in order to produce transferrable knowledge that could potentially be used in other contexts. 

This is the upside to the tools of abstraction, which although carry the danger of removing a thing from its context and changing its meaning and effects, can also confer a flexibility and universality to that thing as well. 

When talking about addressing some of the more pressing problems of our modern world, for example, there are many ways to simplify and detoxify one's life, and to re-organize one's energies and priorities. I write from my direct experiences living and working in the woods on a homestead, but not everyone can do that. Not everyone wants to do that besides. It would be an environmental disaster anyway; there are a lot of people in the world. 

To draw a direct contrast to the woods or any other rural environment, there are all sorts of possibilities for material, social, political, economic, intellectual, and spiritual revolution in the city, or somewhere in between, and indeed, much of what I've learned has consisted of moving back and forth between these worlds. And short of huge numbers of people suddenly dying off - a result our genocidal rulers might be fine with, regardless of its actual consequences - all of these people in existence have to live somewhere, and theoretically our dense and well-managed cities are the best way to do that. 

Besides, as I've expressed before, a given stage of development of the built environment finds its way into the wilderness eventually, transforming it, just as the state of the wilderness itself affects the built environment, and one is living in that totality. One consequence of this is that the act of homesteading changes in its nature throughout history, just as the act of city-living changes through time as well. Neither of these pure concepts can exist in isolation in the real.    

Part of the holistic thought here entails that the rest of the world is still out there, and doing its thing regardless of what one does, though one can certainly have good faith influence in small ways as well. For my part, I can only attempt to express the truths I apprehend in the particular sphere that I reside in and have a deeper experience of. 

But the way in which one expresses those truths does matter. Abstracting from the grounded and concrete to share those relations, in the hope that those abstracted relations are responsibly received and processed, and then eventually reconfigured and re-instantiated in others' concrete contexts and lives, positively informing them, is one way to go about this. 

I hope I've successfully expressed that I'm not all that interested in evangelizing some limited and particular lifestyle and ethic, to be forcefully adopted by the whole of creation. Such impulses can be quite arrogant at best, but they can also form the eventual building blocks of totalitarian thought and practice and well. 

But there is a balance to be struck here as well, because if I were just to put out my two cents, and then shrug and say, "hey everything is relative, to each their own," with no real interest in the arguments and their results, then what is the point? There is ultimately a way in which things work: how to successfully get by and live a decent life in the circumstances one finds oneself in. And there are good and bad ways to use less energy and avoid ecological trashing. At the same time though, one should also cultivate a good sense of when one is just pissing in the wind. 

Uncertainty in the Built Environment Pt. 7 - Practice and Conclusion

There is an important difference between confronting the idea of wilderness as bound to a certain place, and then confronting the idea upon its being disentangled from that place. 

You can go into into the wilderness as a place and have some really wild and incredible experiences. Things can get weirder and more interesting the less amenities you bring into it, or if you are experiencing some privation in your self, or perceptual alteration. 

The mountains and foothills, the deserts and badlands, the forests and scrublands...these places all entail different dynamics and experiences, and require different preparations to go into them. But all in all, going into a wilderness area comes with a certain established set of practices that you can become acquainted with and understand. There is a whole industry of outdoor sporting goods that stands at the ready to outfit you and make that outdoor experience as enjoyable and successful as possible. Further, the more you go into it, the more you become acquainted with how it works, and the more comfortable you become regularly going in. 

A conceptual wilderness is a little different, whether that wilderness is found in a wild area, a built environment, or within one's own self. We are talking less here about going to a certain place, accompanied by certain things, and more about an unstable and unintelligible relation of elements to one's everyday understanding of daily reality. This means entering a certain state of consciousness, and even a certain ontological state, which entails certain experiences and practices. 

What we are talking about is fundamental uncertainty. Not just whether we're unsure whether to go with the chicken or beef for dinner, or even willpower fatigue or decision paralysis - which can be serious problems in themselves - but a fundamental uncertainty about how to understand and relate to a given state of affairs, and at the extreme end, whether a certain course of action will ensure the immediate or future continuity of one's own self. At a long enough sustain, this state can encourage doubts about the very nature of one's reality. 

How to enter into - or even cope with - such a state of affairs? How to manage and practice in a state of uncertainty or unpredictability? It seems as though to manage something or practice something, you have to have something to anticipate, or be able to predict something, however obscure that something is, so as to have some kind of handle to manage, or direction to practice towards.

I think one thing we can say, is that so long as you are living and breathing, that by definition, there is always some sort of predictable, practicable foothold to move towards, however chaotic and uncertain a given environment is. If something is too chaotic and uncertain, in which everything solid is evaporating and flying asunder, say in the heart of some explosion, then that is the end anyway. 

The footholds can appear as anything from food, water, raw resources, and shelter in the wild, money and credit, traded goods, utilities, and shelter, and social relations in the built environment, clarity of mind, spirit and heart, confidence, and reasoning efficacy in the self, and so on. 

So, the idea is to predict unpredictability, while angling towards some sort of practical predictability in the process. This might still seem obscure, so perhaps we move closer to the concrete now? Of the various practices, there are a few different elements we can put together here. 

One principle is this: localized control. Anything you can do yourself, or which can be done by immediate family, friends, colleagues, etc., anyone with whom you have a strong enough bond to be trusted under strain, is more dependable through external failures or foreclosures of action or resource. Having at least one dependable point of strength somewhere which can be leveraged - such as security and shelter - can serve as a foothold to consolidate other sources of strength.

Lower, denser centers of gravity, in a metaphorical sense, can help. Not necessarily literal lower ground, as higher ground and its various advantages can be of benefit, but simplicity of action and robustness of resource and tool. Something you can source or make yourself, or get from somewhere local and dependable.

Complex Rube Goldberg machines such as industrial supply chains spanning continents can make for the rapid provision of powerful and useful resources, and should be taken advantage of, but they can't be counted on into perpetuity either. 

Here is another principle: it is good to have redundancy. In an uncertain and unpredictable environment, things fail, and that can mean the failure of any one of your footholds. Back up options and plans are great, or alternative pathways that can potentially be pursued. Having some very basic and universally useful provisions always on hand for example, which are not used up but which are saved for emergencies, can fill in some important gaps when unexpected things happen. Obvious resources like water, dried and/or non-perishable foods, lights and tools, and etc. 

And yet here is another principle: a diverse toolkit of dependable practices and protocols that can be turned to in a pinch, which can be maintained with regular repetition. It may feel completely natural to flick on the gas or electric stove to boil some water, but what if one doesn't have access to gas or electricity? Making a fire is not always easy, and requires preparations of its own, which are useful to practice. Using older and simpler technologies is not always simple, and requires a holistic movement into their art and technique. 

By that same token, community trust is built up and earned through skills of communication, emoting, and mutual aid, a trust that can yield great power and benefit, and the same is the case with maintaining one's personal spirituality, which has implications not only for how one as an individual moves in the world, but with how one moves with others. There are multiple layers of discipline, resource, and repetition to hold into account. 

Diversity is key, as each given tool fits into the other and reinforces the whole. One cannot properly and skillfully pursue alternatives or safely pursue physical emergencies if one's mind is in disarray for example. Physical practice, mental practice, spiritual practice: all of these things work together. 

So, with our practice. are we to accomplish the re-establishment of the home under duress, and then move on to systematically drive back every last trace of the wilderness then, so that it never troubles us again? Oh ho ho, I'd really be leading us astray if I were to suggest such a thing. 

I think one of the more serious weaknesses of modern industrial society is its relentless pursuit of convenience and comfort, both of which are such obviously good and desirable things that it becomes difficult to see when one can have too much of them. Such a society is terminally self-absorbed and enamored with itself, sealing itself into its own warm and safe environs, which doubles as a symbolic and experiential hall of mirrors in which the original signal successively decays and winks out. 

You need a wilderness, and sources of uncertainty, to perpetually improve things and oneself, to stay abreast of a world that is itself undergoing constant change. There are many other benefits to wilderness that I've hinted at before, and which I'll gloss over now, such as source of resources in the form of natural processes or social processes that need to be trusted and left alone to regenerate, spiritual benefits such as wonder and awe and gratitude, and so on.  

But by that same coin, is complete immersion in wilderness a panacea then? Does one make oneself perpetually stronger by living in as difficult and austere and alienating conditions as possible? No, emphatically not that either. 

Constant uncertainty and chaos only exhaust people over the long run, leading to strife and increasing desperation, until spectacular acts of cruelty lead to severe counterreactions in which you have warlord-types building out fortresses of confidence, shutting out the outside world and freezing the dynamism of reality so that nothing like that ever happens again.    

One needs a home, a stable place of comfort, and a community to love and care for, and the constellation of pleasures and contentments that come with those things, which makes life enjoyable and worth living, to do the really difficult stuff to secure those things in turn. 

Ah but now it appears that the post grows long. It seems as though we've just started to get into the juicy stuff as this post and series are coming to an end. This is a process that can last a lifetime and then some, and as usual, we'll explore these themes in other ways in the future. 

Uncertainty in the Built Environment Pt. 6 - The Wilderness

I've already largely covered this in the course of this discussion and elsewhere: that the concept of "wilderness" is commonly bound to an environment relatively untouched by human activity and design which is certainly a useful conceptual unity with applications for narrative and argument. Seeing as how most of the world's population now lives in urban environments, a spatially and socially remote space that is relatively undeveloped is necessarily experienced as something wholly different from daily perception in a built environment, with a host of practical and subjective consequences following that.  

So when we talk about a wilderness, we often visualize a dark woods with limited lines of sight. There may be spooky bird and insect calls emanating from somewhere in the background, and out just beyond in the darkness there may lurk some sort of shadowy apex predator ready to sink its teeth into you if you let your guard down. 

This menacing imagery and the feelings it evokes can also be transferred to other contexts to make a point. A certain social/political environment that is steadily growing more chaotic and dangerous may be referred to as a "wilderness of horrors" or some such phrasing, for example, to appeal to a certain sensibility for evaluating the situation. 

We see that the concept can be moved around. I've also established that by suggesting that the built environment in the United States (and elsewhere) is more and more resembling a wilderness. The flexibility of the concept can further be demonstrated by going into the heart of the default imagery itself. 

For most of the year, I live fairly deep in a "dark woods," a so-called "wilderness," but we wouldn't call the surrounding area a wilderness. You might get more of a wilderness the deeper you travel into the woods, away from any kind of habitation, but even the "wildness" of the immediate surrounding woods is experienced as "home" to us. After some initial acclimation and familiarization, the surrounding woods are now intimately familiar, readily recognizable, and well-understood. 

There is the occasional passing bear or cougar, but one picks up on the signs when they are around and one knows how to take care around them. The owl calls in the middle of the night are lovely, and there are all sorts of other welcome background noises that one appreciates when one gets to know them.

Indeed, I feel safer in that particular corner of the woods than just about anywhere else. The dark can be disorienting, even upon being very close to my dwelling, and things are quite unsettling there when there is a storm and all the trees are swaying and groaning under the strain. And the tension is palpable when there is a high fire danger in the summer, or when some jackass is firing his gun into the woods nearby. 

If I were to wander deeper and deeper into the woods in any direction, to the point of no longer recognizing my surroundings, then I would begin to get the sense again that I was in a wilderness. At the same time, that circumstance has been somewhat counteracted over the years after extensive exploration in the area, widening the scope of my familiarity. 

You don't have to know every little detail in your neighborhood to become comfortable in it. I've become familiar with the basic direction and sound of the Carbon River in the south, the upward sweep of the hill terrain to the north and the contours of the land, identifiable trees of a certain character in various areas, other landmarks, and so on. 

If you know what to expect given any direction of travel, and you are operating with regularity in a certain area that has a stability of daily occurrence, with a procession of events and phenomena you can confidently incorporate into the daily rhythms of your life, then you can feel more at "home" there, and it appears as less of a wilderness. 

There are other phenomenological aspects to feeling a certain way in a certain environment, which we could briefly illustrate by looking at additional features of where I live. I can actually experience moving back and forth through various gradations of wilderness-feeling and perception, depending on my immediate surroundings. 

At the homestead where I live and work, we have a nice bench at the edge of the woods where the forest ends and a clearcut begins, which offers a sweeping view of the canyon to the west. It is a nice place to watch the sunset. With the high visibility that the clearcut affords, looking out to the west triggers that feeling of familiarity and dependability, but you also know that further in that direction is more wilderness, while behind you, back inside the dark forest, your vision is cut off and you can't see inside, giving an air of the unknown and a feeling of uncertainty, even though back in that direction is home. 

As the sun goes down, you start getting that feeling: "There goes the remaining light and heat, better get inside." A wilderness descends through the dark and cold. Upon turning back, you get this odd sensation. Because of the higher light levels outside of the forest, you turn around to go back into the woods to go home but your vision cannot penetrate beyond the first row of trees, and that feeling of the wilderness comes back: for a moment you are entering back into the wilderness and the unknown. But then as soon as you are back in the woods, and your eyes adjust to the lower light inside, you recognize all of the trees and pathways within, and the fleeting feeling of the wilderness goes away. You are back home.   

On the other hand, the built environment - which was supposedly built to facilitate the comfortable life activity of humans such as myself - is a place of increasing contention where I (and plenty of others) feel increasingly unsettled. We've covered that contention previously: all of the many scams out there, supposedly welcoming and helpful symbols which ensnare you and then drain you of your resources, or the failing infrastructure which is increasingly unstable, or the increasingly erratic and troubled behavior of fellow humans under too much pressure, or the silent, invisible pathogens which travel through the air, which we stopped addressing or even tracking. Or what about the lone nuts that suddenly open fire on a public space? Or the roving bands of marauder-crusaders we call ICE? Oh I could go on. 

Further, by disrespecting the natural world, forcing it to do what we want while refusing to acknowledge its nature, all the while exhausting it and demanding ever more of it, the natural world has no recourse but to flow to whatever outlets it can, as it now increasingly intercedes into the built environment forcefully, in the form of natural disasters and other inconveniences. 

And also as I've illustrated before, the forces of the wild tend to bring out the wild in us, and there is a wilderness in us that can be explored by going into the wild, or simply turning inward and exploring deep into our inner wilds from the comfort of our homes through various meditative practices. 

So the wilderness can change and shift around, depending on where you are, what you are, and what you are doing. As I've been saying for ages, this has important practical applications. We're finally going to get to those next, and put this albatross of a series to rest. 

Hand Out

For all of its problems, I do use Wikipedia all of the time. And I can't help but be struck by the constant intrusive fundraiser messages, waving their bright-lettered appeals in your face as you browse, begging for some miniscule amount of money. 

We're talking about an informational and referencing backbone here: it is often Wikipedia information that appears in the AI summaries, or else it is just directly referenced by the search engines, displayed at the top of the results, when you search for just about anything. 

All of the work that goes into maintaining Wikipedia: all of that labor, all of that information, the weaving together of dense referential constellations of information, the constant contention of assertions and verifications. Wikipedia is massive and at the center of reference and Internet utilization, and all of these massive tech companies are using its ubiquitous public presence everyday to prove they are useful to their customers. Why does Wikipedia have to constantly ask me for $2.75? Where the hell is all the money going? 

This reflects a very general relation of capital to the environment, or even to what's left of the public commons. It makes me think of The Giving Tree, as one variation of an old mythic narrative piece. Just take and take and take, who cares? Everyone else is too. Take until all you have left is a stump to sit on when you're finally out of juice. 

Mine!

You can see a particular kind of fragmentation in the United States, in which as the center disintegrates, new fledgling centers coalesce, breaking away and accumulating what resources they can rip off from everything else. 

You see this on a behavioral, individual level too: people running red lights, for instance, or refusing to back down from petty arguments, taking as much as possible as contraction sets in, regardless of the social cost. 

You can also see it on the collective, market level: the scams built upon scams, or the scams that have taken hold of legacy services and public resources. 

Collective deliberation is the sloshing to and fro of various factions and interest groups, opportunistic individuals cobbling the organization and power they can to take as much as they can, before coming up against groups organized to Do Something. 

On the daily, it is hard to watch, and spiritually it is hard to countenance. But you do see people organize to help each other and make things better in the really hard times too, and I'm definitely seeing glimmers of that sort of thing. 

Panopticon Fight

There are a lot of different ways that the Internet screws with people's heads, but there is one potential component that I think gets overlooked. You interact on social media with a faint (or very sharp) awareness that you are potentially being observed by a lot of people. And being observed while in conversation with someone, or when arguing with them, can dramatically change how that conversation or argument plays out. So does your history and your intentions with that person. If you are arguing with someone as an equal in an attempt to understand where they are coming from, in the spirit of cooperation, you are going to try hard to hear what they are saying, and allow for a certain flexibility of definitions and understandings. 

If you enter into that argument on the other hand under intense observation and scrutiny, you might be subconsciously putting some armor on, fixing definitions and understandings, and then white-knuckling whatever heuristic you have handy for understanding the world, because by golly you don't want to look like some lowly worm do you? Especially if you've been through previous fights, taunted and battered about by the enemy, and you've been steadily ground-down in daily life, your purchasing power and your personal efficacy steadily eaten away in a series of quiet humiliations.  

Remodel

Generally speaking, I find it much more interesting and fun to build new, as opposed to remodeling. But the thing about remodeling - especially when the previous jackass whose work you're remodeling was you - is that it changes the nature of the building process itself entirely, considering that you are face to face not with raw earth, but with something that is already built. It changes your conception of what you build, how you build it, and why. Because sooner or later you might come face to face with it again, especially if you don't have the time and resources to scrap it and start new, and when that happens, it is better to be kind to your future self, lest you become trapped in a downward spiral. 

Uncertainty in the Built Environment Pt. 5

This Uncertainty in the Built Environment series also was a bit of an albatross: the subject matter of these posts required covering a lot of ground, and then I became very sick with Covid and the whole thing lost momentum, until finally stalling out and then just sitting there for some time. This is a huge pain in the ass: you lose your many trains of thought and coherence, and then go back to the thing to try to pick up where you left off, torn between finishing it out less strong, or tossing the thing entirely. 

I was tempted to scrap this shit, but reading it over, I'm seeing that there is still some meat here, and some important themes buried within that I'll be returning to anyway. If you bear with me through this undercooked post, I'll start a little more fresh on the next one and salvage some useful concepts for working through later. 

For the completionist, here is 1, 2, and 3, with 4 following just below. Not everyone has time for that though. I'll try to get the salient points across from here on out. 

Previously in part 4 I painted a bit of an intense picture of what uncertainty in the wilderness looks like. More importantly, we can use that picture to analyze the current state of the built environment, and of course assess the implications of that state. This is an exercise that feels all the more pressing, considering the state of current affairs in the United States especially. 

Here for many, the built environment is beginning to take on the subjective experience of a wilderness, a process that has been well underway for decades, and which is experienced at varying levels of intensity depending on the individual's social, political, geographic, and economic locations. The concept of the wilderness itself needs to be further addressed for clarification, but I'd like to save that for the next post, as I believe we have enough to directly address the subject matter alluded to by the title of this series of posts. 

Now, as we touched on before, the built environment is most immediately represented by the material supports of the urban environment - used in this case in a more general sense - but the phenomena itself is more an expression of a deep need to persist and even flourish at greater timescales, and so from the built environment flows an entire evolving world of ancillary processes such as the medical system, water and energy and waste systems, food distribution, transportation, research, administration, legal regulation, and so on. 

Many of these patterns seek to stabilize and maintain the many life processes on multiple levels, say on the molecular, individual, local, and collective levels, and to establish certain acceptable levels of predictability and certainty for the perpetuation of human life. 

Part of the problem here is that for numerous and deeply complex historical, evolutionary, and even thermodynamic reasons, the process to achieve stability and certainty tips well over into not only flourishing and then a bid at perpetual ecstasy, but also to absolute power and domination, which is necessarily a localized process, no matter how intently its universal conceits are declared. 

With such uneven patterns of development then, the historical regions of certainty and organization are always moving and shifting, and with them - and inextricably bound up with them - the regions of uncertainty and so-called chaos. 

We've been meditating on this process and its nature and consequences here for quite some time, and indeed it is incredibly complex and as a result, difficult to describe as a totality, but then that is what the wilderness metaphor is for: we can provisionally collapse these processes down into the simple matters of access to food and energy and basic survival, and then the subjective experience of such things. One way to illustrate the movements of organization and stability, and their contrasting regions of uncertainty, is to illustrate the basic contrasting consequences and experiences of these phenomena. 

This is getting easier to do now, because the contrast between flourishing and struggling is proceeding to such a stark and sharp disparity between classes of individuals, and then there is the growing polarization of the shrinking wealthy classes and the growing impoverished classes.

One is of a certain class, ticking off the right identity boxes in certain regions of affluence, and everywhere one walks, there is somewhere to instantly procure food, energy, transportation, what have you. You get lost, and you merely need to speak, and soon you'll be on your way. 

Move over to another class, another set of identity markers, and one is regarded with puzzlement and suspicion. One loses the ability to speak, or to be seen and understood, regarded instead as a threat, and one better mind one's step. There is less certainty in the daily furnishing of food, water, shelter, and heat, which at present is increasingly being rationed in accordance with the money system, a rationing that will increasingly become more territorial as the money system is increasingly abused and broken down, as is apparent in the behavior of the rich and powerful increasingly buying up material security in the form of land and natural resources, and of national boundaries sharpening and clarifying under the increasing strain of global trade. 

This uncertainty manifests all sorts of compensatory behaviors which complicate the public sphere and introduce a chaotic, shifting mass of activity that is more difficult for central powers to manipulate and anticipate. Lying, stealing, murder, social threat and domination, addiction, suicide, and so on are examples of the many alternatives available to individuals and then states abandoned to a social and geopolitical wilderness where food and protection are no longer guaranteed, all of which have profound social and political consequences that must be dealt with in turn. 

The many micro-events influence the development of a macro, or structural set of ongoing forces, which produce their own micro-events in turn. At the risk of entering a particular sequence of events mid-stream in the narrative, you had a socially, politically, and economically weakening global capitalist system - which was built for the rapid movement and suffusion of material globally - take up the coronavirus that causes Covid, which rapidly moved through the global population, reproducing and evolving and reinfecting rapidly in waves, doing damage as it went. 

This pandemic was able to bloom into fruition through a growing political economic wilderness in which a populace was increasingly set against itself, and the virus, doing its damage, contributed to a seizing up of global supply chains, and an acceleration of the concentration of capital, among other knock on effects, accelerating the mistrust of collective institutions and even guiding ideologies. We've been covering this growing chaos and uncertainty in the context of the decline of the West, but there are similar issues springing up globally - if in different forms - due in part to the universality of an increasingly unstable global climate. 

Uncertainty and certainty are connected conceptually, yes, but they are also closely connected in practice. Where chaos and uncertainty grows, there grows with them an insatiable hunger for certainty and stability, which pursued in a concentrated and forceful matter, produces more of its opposite in well-proportioned amounts. 

To make better sense of these tangled concepts in tension with each other, I'd like to address the shifting nature of the wilderness and its lessons. Uncertainty is in our present narrative closely associated with the wilderness, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. Though the identity of the concepts of "uncertainty" and "wilderness" have been useful to establish a narrative thus far, the concepts themselves will be more useful to us on a practical level when they are disentangled. Next time we can untangle those things and see what is there.  

On Yule

Here we're on the eve of the Western Christmas, that Christian and then commercial graft onto the body of pagan traditions, stories, and symbols called Yule, which circulating and crosspollinating among the Roman, Germanic, Nordic, and Celtic worlds, gelled into the coherent winter holiday we enjoy today. 

Yule myth actually contains some really interesting ideas and phenomena: communication with the dead continues on from Samhain, and as the cold and dark really start to set in, vibrant colors and symbols of vitality are bandied about to buttress the community against the bleak chill pressing in from all sides. Strange and sometimes dangerous spirits wander the frozen landscape out there in the dark, which are best sheltered in from, avoided, and ignored.  Me? I do choose to ignore the unrecognized Timeshare Exit calls that have recently invaded my phone.  

We get some of the residue of those sentiments as winter passes over us in the Western Hemisphere, though the nature of winter itself is changing within my lifetime. One wonders where the myth goes from here. 

I'll have to get more into that later, as family will soon be here, and I'll be quite busy. For a lot of folks, the light and color and food and company creates a welcome warm pocket to push back what cold is left. If that's you, enjoy, and if not, enjoy the quiet nevertheless.     

Damages

One ongoing concern at this here blog is the course and nature of what we could call "damage" sustained on human societies contemporaneously. Though the damage takes place along a spectrum, with more kinetic forms continuing to exist in current war zones, there are also slower, multifaceted, and quiet forms which continue on with a heightened insidiousness, which produce the more kinetic and concentrated forms, which despite their geographically remote and concentrated nature, nevertheless feed back into the less kinetic forms, advancing them all the same. Understanding this damage is crucial to understanding and anticipating the arc of decline in industrial age societies, and we'll continue to get deeper into that subject as per usual. 

In this case, I'm grateful that Ian Welsh has stayed on the subject of Covid damage since the very beginning, as this is a tricky and complex process that is made even more complicated by heavy propagandizing in the press and in our political economy. 

As Ian describes - and the chart he links to is astounding - wave after wave of Covid infection has steadily ground down the population's immune response, among many other things, which results in a grinding merry-go-round of secondary infections, all of which produce additional heavy damage throughout society on multiple levels.  I'd suggest reading this post as well, which taken together with the Covid piece, carries the implication that damage and leadership are related and influence each other, as Ian mentions.

This is personal for me. As I sit here writing, I'm slightly out of breath and quite achey. My Long Covid has largely healed. I've gotten away from the fire, and it no longer actively burns, but the scars are still there, and occasionally they still hurt. I haven't been the same. And like the archetypal burn victim, I'm quite wary of the fire: even distant and suggestive glimpses of it are enough to activate my early defenses and put me on alert. 

Now, roughly 5 years after the start of the Covid pandemic, Covid is everywhere, and anecdotally (with regular observations of national policy and messaging) very few people care to track it or even mitigate or take the slightest precaution that actually works. I still hear people going on with, "Don't worry we've wiped down all the surfaces with bleach and are being really careful." Huh? Not even a year into the pandemic, we knew it was in the air and that you had to clean the fucking air. And that is one thing we refuse to do. 

Even further, here in Southern California, the air quality is worse than I've ever seen it. There is a perpetual build-out and population growth - more cars and wider freeways - and geography and climate conditions have led to a capping effect in which the Los Angeles basin traps all of the smog and holds it in, with the result of lingering garbage air and constant smog alerts and burn bans. Are we doing anything on a large scale about ventilation and sick buildings at the very least? Might not be able to contain those local growth engines, and we might not be able to muster the coordination, trust, and purpose it takes to build out mass transit. Folks have forgotten the lessons of the 60's and 70's and the smog alerts, and all of the heart disease and cancers and cognitive dysfunction and other maladies that come from that. And of course, all of this is also hard on immune systems, bringing on more Covid, which brings on more secondary infections, and we get more and more tired and brittle and hand-wavey about the bare minimum mitigation. 

I get it, bleach is cheap and air purification, ventilation, and HVAC are expensive, and the virus is everywhere and they just aren't trying anymore, so what is the average person to do? But even low-cost mitigation and effort can't be bothered with. We are collectively sleep-walking into the miasma and then steadily ground-down. 

All of the messaging has overwhelmingly downplayed aerosol dynamics and structural environmental mitigation, and emphasized surface cleaning, distancing, and personal responsibility. Here, Fela Kuti's Zombie comes to mind, with anti-police and anti-military messaging that could be readily transferred to a more generalized population group, following orders, or mass propaganda, and marching on, rotting away all the while. 

Setting aside the personalized venting here, I don't necessarily mean for this to be a finger-wagging moral condemnation either. People are exhausted. Large-scale problem solving measures, or even basic mitigation, simply can't be done as a matter of failed capacity and functionality. This is what the damage looks like and feels like on a social and subjective level.